Chandrayaan-1 successful but could have achieved more: Pieters

Chandrayaan-1 was a successful mission though it could have achieved more had it lasted its full term of two years, a senior US-based scientist said today.

"We have reached the level of having our initial overview completed. What we have not achieved is our ultimate goal, which was a much more extended mission that was to be achieved during the full 2 years," Carle Pieters, science manager at NASA supported spectrology facility at Brown university in USA, told reporters here.

She was commenting on the success of India's first moon mission, on the sidelines of an international conference on low cost planetary missions in Panaji.

Pieters, a NASA-collaborator associated with Chandrayaan's moon mineralogy mapper, said that scientists had accomplished what they wanted to in the first phase. We will be working with the data in the future, she said.

"The achievements are very difficult to accomplish. We are very happy to be a part of this adventure," Pieters said. Asked her opinion on Indian Space Research Organisation chief Dr G Madhavan Nair's claims of 95 per cent success, Pieters said that she would not be able to comment much as she had information only on the experiment she was associated with.